In the app i'm working on now, I really want to get the page loading fast-fast-fast. I have all javascript combined into one file, minimized, gzipped, far-future cached. Same with CSS. (Rails does this for me, mostly). javascript file is also marked with 'async' attribute. All images are set up so loading images doesn't block initial page load.
300ms for https round trips remain. shrug. it is unfortunate, but I stick with https anyway. Making sure your web server is doing persistent http connections is about the only thing I know to do to ameliorate somewhat, but first connection is still slower than I'd like, due to https.
something may very well be wrong, and it may be outside of my abilities or time to figure out what. :)
I am looking into increasing the SSL Session keeping length on my apache, have any opinion about that? It does seem to eliminate the extra 'tax' for SSL in my from-slow-network experiments, for the duration of the session eliminating re-negotiation.
As ballpark figures for SSL session cache timeouts, Apache defaults to 5 minutes, F5 load balancers default to 1 hour and JBoss is 1 day. So it really seems like a wide range of values get used out in the world.
Upping to an hour should cause no problems. With SHM cache that will use a bit more memory, should make no practical difference for DBM.
The other thing to watch out for (mentioned at link) is that lots of cheap SSL certs have a cert chain like 4 or 5 items long, bloating startup.
That shows that 5983 bytes of intermediate certs are being sent over and above the actual server cert. That's going to eat a bunch of RTTs during SSL setup.
300ms for https round trips remain. shrug. it is unfortunate, but I stick with https anyway. Making sure your web server is doing persistent http connections is about the only thing I know to do to ameliorate somewhat, but first connection is still slower than I'd like, due to https.